I've driven past some of those areas on the way home from Chicago. I just assumed they were swaps that hadn't been drained for some reason. It's interesting to know that they were once dumps for the millions of tons of slag that got produced along with the steel the region is known for.
The Calumet region has it's share of environmental dumpster fires. In fact, there were areas in East Chicago, Indiana (which doesn't actually border Chicago, btw) where the topsoil was 0.1% lead.
Growing up, my neighbor told me of his youth near the refineries in Whiting when he and his friends hit the GASOLINE Table digging a hole in back yard, which was used for fueling cars until Standard Oil found out about it, and bought up the neighborhood.
As a ham radio operator (KA9DGX), I tend to view all of this through the lens of impedance matching, it's my metaphor of choice.
You could use a badly designed antenna with a horrible VSWR at the end of a coax, and effectively communicate with some portion of the world, by using a tuner, which helps cover up the inefficiencies involved. However, doing so loses signal, in both directions. You can add amplification at the antenna for receive (a pre-amp) and transmit with more power, but eventually the coax will break down, possibly well before the legal limit.
It is far better to use a well designed antenna and matching system at the feed point. It maximizes signal transmission in both directions, by reducing losses as much as possible.
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A compiler matches our cognitive impedance to that of the computer. We don't handle generating opcodes and instruction addresses manually very well. I don't see how an LLM is going to do that any better. Compilers, on the other hand, do it reliably, and very efficiently.
The best cognitive impedance matches happened a while ago, when Visual Basic 6 and Delphi for Windows first came out. You might think LLMs make it easier that that, but you'd be mistaken, for any problem of sufficient complexity.
Long, long ago I came up with a text search algorithm while working on PCxRef to help technical sales support at IBM. My first approach using a naive string search took about 30 seconds on a PC. My algorithm got it down to the speed of disk access.
Basically I precomputed a table of masks and used the XLAT instruction in a very tight loop to fly though all the product descriptions for everything IBM offered back around 1983. I could accommodate case insensitivity and single character wildcards.
The test search was always "dos tech ref" to find the IBM DOS Technical reference manual.
I still have a cheap Casio I use from time to time. Using it to calculate logarithms using only multiplication to the 10th power and the occasional divide by 10 was a calming thing to do over lunch in the gear shop without Internet access.
Start with X.
If 10 or more add 1 to the log10 for each decimal
If smaller than 1, subtract 1 each time you multiply by 10.writw that down plus a decimal point
Now the fun part, the fraction of the logarithm
Hit multiply 9 times then equal, to get the 10th power on the Casio
Each time you divide by 10 to get it back into range between 1 and 10, add 1 to the fraction
Repeat until you've got enough digits
PS: it also works for binary or any other integer base.
I use Termux to host my 11/780 VAX/VMS system on my cheap ass Motorola phone, thanks to SimH.
Beware of one thing, though... if you upgrade Termux, or remove/reinstall, you lose everything inside that "linux" system. I lost my first VAX setup that way. 8(
The next big OS leap is a capabilities based security with a microkernel. The old model of assuming you wanted to share your authority with everything you run is unsustainable. It should have been a thing at least 20 years ago.
>>Please elaborate. How does this resonate with the average user who doesn't know anything about infosec?
Elaboration, with too much pop culture... ;-)
When you use cash, for example, you're using capabilities. You can hand out exactly $3.50 to the Loch Ness Monster[1], and no matter what, he's not going to be able to leverage that into taking out your entire bank balance, etc.
The current "ambient authority" system is like handing the Loch Ness Monster your wallet, and HOPING he only takes $3.50.
Another metaphor is power outlets, which limit how much of the power from the grid makes it to your device. The current system is much like the electric - i - cal, at the Douglass house in Green Acres.[2]
The point is, you can run any program you want, and give it only the files you want, and nothing else, by default in such a system. For the user, it really doesn't have to seem that different, they already use dialog boxes to select files to open and save things, they could use a "power box"[3] instead, which looks the same, except then the OS enforces their choices.
I haven't seen the "This is how you use it as a daily driver" video yet. Maybe it's lack of google-fu on my part?
If I can throw it on an inexpensive desktop, and the run Linux and Windows under it, and maybe do some Lazarus/Free pascal development, I'll be a happy camper.
The "this is how you use it as a daily driver" would be for the sub project called SculptOS, you can find details on that and how to set it up here: https://genode.org/download/sculpt
> If I can throw it on an inexpensive desktop, and the run Linux and Windows under it, and maybe do some Lazarus/Free pascal development, I'll be a happy camper.
It’s capable of this today. Be aware that VMs do have a noticeable performance impact, but on a powerful system they aren’t unusably slow.
Earlier today, it occurred to me that the "spot" price could go to zero if the physical metal isn't available for delivery. I missed the dip down into the 70s.
The Wikipedia page about tool use by non humans started me down a rabbit hole that lead to this delightful video of Stoffel the Honey Badger who clearly understands tool use.[2]
The Calumet region has it's share of environmental dumpster fires. In fact, there were areas in East Chicago, Indiana (which doesn't actually border Chicago, btw) where the topsoil was 0.1% lead.
Growing up, my neighbor told me of his youth near the refineries in Whiting when he and his friends hit the GASOLINE Table digging a hole in back yard, which was used for fueling cars until Standard Oil found out about it, and bought up the neighborhood.
I'm a proud Region Rat.
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